I'll be honest, I secretly hoped JSPM would win the front end over and become our standard, and while I haven't truly followed it closely in the last year or so I recently tried this out and was blown away at how beautifully simple it is (at least on the surface).

Say I want to quickly run some Mocha test in a browser. Like say I'm spiking something, wanting to use tests in something like jsbin or plunkr and just get code running quickly.

This package is loaded using the import functionality built into our browsers now and JSPM which allows us to load some npm packages right through the browser. MAGIC!

WARNING: DO NOT do this for a production-type environment. This is just a quick prototype tool leveraging JSPM's dev hosted servers that allow us to use import to load packages via NPM through their servers. Thank you JSPM.

I've done this a few times lately, and am almost able to do it without looking up api and syntax O_O. I also don't need webpack, gulp, servers, or anything but a wee-bit of html/js and some luck (that JSPM servers will hang in there).

The topic of using JavaScript single ' or double " quotes comes up often enough that I thought I'd create a bit of an amalgamation of items around the topic for future reference.

Today, it came up at work when someone sent a PR to our internal standard eslint config repository and there were some various points brought up with no real final solid winner or resolution.

In this post, I'm not (sadly) going to write anything interesting or profound or even original. Just wanted to aggregate some pros/cons as I've seen splattered in various locations around the web on the topic.

The most important point or the TL;DR

Define one standard and stick to it. Do not use one in one file, and a different one in another file, or even especially avoid mixing quotes within the same file if possible.

Basic qualities they both share

They both represent strings (yay! strings!)

Which ever one you start with, must be the same one you end the string with.

There is really no difference in the end between using single or double quotes, meaning they both represent a string in the end. The system doesn't really care which one you use (but you might?).

No need to escape the other character within a string. So a double quoted string can have single quotes without escaping them, and a single quoted string can have double quotes within it without having to escape them.

"Double quotes with a single ( ' ) quote in the middle"

'Single quotes with a double ( " ) quote in the middle'

Each type must escape their own type

"double quotes ( \" ) must escape a double quote"

'single quotes ( \' ) must escape a single quote'

On German, Hungarian, Austrian, and many other keyboards, you have to use the Shift key for both single or double quotes.

On Turkish Q keyboards it's apparently the other way around (need <Shift> for single quote vs double).

Pros for single quotes:

One popular argument for single quotes is when you have to write html within javascript:

If you use single quotes you can write var html = '<div id="some_div"></div>'

If you use double quotes you must escape each nested " EX: var html = "<div id=\"some_div\"></div>" which can get annoying. Or you could use single quotes within the html string, but I don't want to cover quotes for html here (that would just hurt)...

Single quotes can often look better when you're using them to represent an empty string '' vs "" (too many little marks in the latter and can be difficult read - ahhh)

Cons for single quotes:

Only real con I can come up with is copying/pasting between JSON and JavaScript files - single quotes are not supported within JSON files, so you'd have to do a host of search/replace (and escaping of double quotes)...

Pros for double quotes:

JSON only allows double quotes (unless you control the data, and can use a library that is more liberal at parsing JSON - but a JSON file with single quotes is not truly a JSON file)

Most likely noobies to JS will be familiar with double quotes from their previous programming languages

Double quotes eliminate the need to escape apostrophes when writing english sentences.

Cons for Double quotes:

Must press an extra key <Shift> when wanting to use double quotes

In the end

I recommend single quotes as a solid standard. Unless you are copying JSON objects in JavaScript and pasting them into JS files a ton - it's generally my personal preference.

From a single Mac if you wanted to access two unique accounts at the same time, I found out through a neat little trick how to accomplish this.

This allows you to log in to a second unique Mac user while already being logged into the first account already. It can be done without having to logout/login to each one individually (one at a time).

Why would I need to do this?

The reasons could vary but here are a couple examples:

If you use one user for work, and one for personal to keep some separate context, but while at work maybe need to access a file or email from the personal account.

You'd like to access a separate iMessage account without it getting mixed into yours. Say you want to spy on the kid. (Not saying whether this is ethical or not - depends on your parenting style - just proposing a reason for using this tool).

Disclaimer

To accomplish this we're going to be turning on some services/features that have the potential to open security vulnerabilities so please use with caution and learn/know your risks.

Setup/Configuration

To accomplish this your Mac needs to have the proper permissions and configuration in place to allow this to happen.

First we need to access the system preferences:

Then open the Sharing preferences:

Then enable Screen Sharing and don't forget to add the specific users you want to allow screen to be shared for.

Note: I blocked out this specific user-name - but assume the blacked out user is the Mac account's user that I want to log into using the Screen Sharing application

I had to enable enable remote login to allow the up-coming ssh command to run. Here is the configuration I used:

Startup an SSH Session

From the currently logged in session, open a Terminal and run the following command:

ssh -NL 5901:localhost:5900 localhost

The -L has this to say in ssh's man pages

-L [bind_address:]port:host:hostport
-L [bind_address:]port:remote_socket
-L local_socket:host:hostport
-L local_socket:remote_socket
Specifies that connections tothegiven TCP port or Unix socket onthelocal (client) host are to be forwarded tothegiven host and port, or Unix socket, onthe remote side. This works by allocating a socket to listen to either a TCP port
onthelocal side, optionally bound tothe specified bind_address, orto a Unix socket. Whenever a connection is made tothelocal port or socket, the connection is forwarded overthe secure channel, and a connection is made to either host
port hostport, orthe Unix socket remote_socket, fromthe remote machine.
Port forwardings can also be specified inthe configuration file. Only the superuser can forward privileged ports. IPv6
addresses can be specified by enclosing the address in square brackets.
By default, thelocal port is bound in accordance withthe GatewayPorts setting. However, an explicit bind_address may be
used to bind the connection to a specific address. The bind_address of ``localhost'' indicates thatthe listening port be
bound forlocal use only, while an empty address or `*' indicates thatthe port should be available from all interfaces.

For -N:

-N Donotexecute a remote command. This is useful for just forwarding ports.

I sometimes write little web app utilities that are often statically hosted. But to use some of the new ES features means I need to drop in a build process that creates a bundle before the code gets checked in.

There are two parts to this.

The raw source code. The ES6+7+next and all the nifty new js features I want to leverage today.

The bundled es5 output.

In some of these projects it means I also check in the bundled code into git. A common use case is to be able to use github's pages feature to host this content (err bundled output) as well as the raw source.

The problem we can run into is if you make a change to the source, commit and push - nothing happened... Because the bundled code didn't get re-bundled, the github hosted pages page doesn't pull the latest changes in.

I'm a fan of using git pre-commit hooks to catch you early in the development life cycle to on things like test errors (or in this case a bundle issues).

So I came up with an example that allows me to make code changes and catch myself from committing when the raw source has changed, but the bundle did not reflect that.

So what is this thing?

The gist is it's a .js script that runs a set of actions and tests for the bundle.js currently vs what's about to be committed. Failing to commit if the current bundle doesn't match what the previous bundle is... Meaning, when we run our build (webpack in this case) if the bundle.js didn't change, we can commit.

This ensures that whatever bundle.js is committed is tied to the code-change the original source. Avoiding "fixing" something in the source and it not actually getting deployed because the bundle is out of date.

First get a pre-commit tool

There are some good options in the npm/node world for pre-commit hooks. Check out husky or pre-commit. However you get your precommit hook setup - great...

In my case I used husky and here are the relevant bits to my package.json.

Today I was playing around with a side-oss-project and had the desire to take an image from the web and base64 data encode it. While I'm sure there is a ton written out there, I didn't immediately find the specific steps in a snippet of code. (Also, I can't say I looked very hard).

So what does any programmer do when he's not satisfied with what he can't find? He writes his own. Now that I've put it together I'm just going to post this here so I can find it again down the road when I need to. :)

Below is a utility function that I threw together that will take an imageUrl parameter and will return through a Promise a base64 encoded image data string. You can see from the example usage below that we're just setting an HTML image .src property to the result of this function and it should just work.

NOTE: also if you look at the code that accomplish this below, it may look a bit like "futuristic" JavaScript right now. With all the async/await, arrow functions, http fetch and all, but the cool thing is you should be able to just copy/paste the below into a JSBin/Plnkr/Codepen without issue (in Chrome). No need for Babel/TypeScript/transpiler if you're just prototyping something (as I was). Don't rely on this to work in all browsers yet but I'm sure when I'll be googling myself for this snippet in the future, this should work in most browsers so I'll just leave this here for now.

I've been working on a project for over a year now that was originally written in ES6 with (some async/await ES7) using BabelJS to transpile and really enjoying the experience of using the latest javascript.

ES6/7 was great at the beginning, when I had 1, then 2... then 5 files. The project was small, I could pretty much load the entire application into my own head at once, reason, tweak, plow forward.

It didn't take too long before the project grew beyond a single load into memory. Now I'm mentally paging out components from different files as I work on various sections of the application.

Just like anything, once the project grew to this point, it became a little more difficult to maintain. Now, I consider myself a fairly solid developer, and that's likely how I made it this far without a compiler as my components were small, surface areas tight and the interactions between them were well managed. I also had a decent number of in-app unit and integration tests because generally (but not always) I'm a test-first kind of guy.

However, that didn't stop me from breaking things, making mistakes or just out-right screwing up a javascript file here and there along the way.

While working on this project, it always niggled me that the project would keep growing without the ability for the most basic of unit-tests to run (the compiler). Almost a year ago I even remember trying to use Typescript but using it with JSPM and without having VisualStudio Code all together, it just never came together (or I just didn't try hard enough).

But this past week, I gave it another go, and while I'm not totally there (or where I'd like to end up), I'm quite happy with the results I've made so far and am impressed and quite happily working in a project that has completely been ported to Typescript from ES6/7 using BabelJS.

First some idea about the project.

Now, when it comes to large software projects, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be calling this project a "large" as the subject of this post seems to label it... But for a system built only by me in some nights and weekends, it is the largest single app I've built alone, so that's where I'm defining "Large".

The project has just about a hundred javascript files/components/classes/modules and comes in just above 12,000 lines of code. That's not counting of course all the dependencies pulled in through JSPM (using both NPM and Github). In fact I really need to look at my dependencies and see where I can trim some fat, but that's not the subject of this post.

Porting from Babel to TypeScript

With some context about the project this is coming from out of the way, I thought it would be helpful to outline the steps (or stumbles) I took along the way to get my project up and running using TypeScript with JSPM.

Pre-migration steps

Below are steps I took to get this thing going. I doubt they're perfect or even apply to your or anyone elses projects, but here's hoping they're helpful

In a fresh temp folder, I used the jspm init command to setup a fresh new project and selected the Typescript transpiler option.

this allowed me to inspect what a "fresh" project from JSPM would look like with Typescript setup.

The next thing I did was review the angular getting started guide to see what Typescript specific configurations they used.

Now, my project isn't Angular (it's actually React based), but I thought I could learn a little something along the way. I don't know if I actually gleaned anything while doing this (as I'm writing this post a ways after I actually did the work, but as an FYI, you might learn something reading it)

What steps did I take to port the project?

Looking back at the series of commits during my port, here's basically what I did. In some cases order doesn't matter below, but I left this list in the order of my projects git commit log.

Renaming each file with the .jsx extension to .tsx (Typescript's variant of JSX) (note: not renaming anything but code I wrote - so don't touch anything in jspm_packages or node_modules folders etc.

Renamed *.js files to *.ts. (Similar to step 1 above with jsx -> tsx but now just the plain JavaScript files)

In all of my source code where I used to do this: import foo from './foo.js' I removed the .js extensions like import foo from './foo'

I did NOT remove the .jsx extension in my import statements - but renamed them to tsx so import foo from './foo.jsx' became import foo from './foo.tjs'

Next I added a file at the root of my client project called globalTypes.d.ts, this is where I could hack in some type definitions that I use globally in the project.

Then I started adding my type definitions...

I used the typings tool to search for TypeScript type definitions. And if I found one, I would typically try to install them from npm.

For example: searching for react like typings search react shows me that there is a DefinitelyTyped version of the type defs and I now know that we can use NPM to install them by typing npm install --save @types/react

So I installed a ton of external library typings.

Next, started looking around my editor VisualStudio Code in hopes to see a bunch of typing errors reported, and was surprised to see very few. No, not because I'm so good at JavaScript that my TypeScript was perfect. Far from it... The problem I had was the tsconfig.json file was not at the root of my project (was at the root of my client site) - but it was nested several folders down from the root of my project. For some reason the editor wasn't picking it up until I opened the editor from the location the tsconfig.json file was rooted, things didn't work.

Honestly, I don't know what the above was about - but was something I ran into. I can't say for certain if it is still an issue - I think I'm starting to see editor features load up regardless of what folder I open things - so your mileage may vary.

Once the TypeScript editor features started lighting up in VS Code, my next steps were start to take the TypeScript's feedback and implement either typing work-arounds or fixing actual bugs the compiler found.

THE END - ish

Where am I now?

The above steps were really all I went through to port this project over to TypeScript and it was relatively seamless. That's not to say it was simple or easy, but definitely do-able, and worth it.

It's been a few weeks since I ported the project to TypeScript and I'm really kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

The editor assist with intellisense of function calls from internal and external modules and their usage/function signatures saves time researching external documentation.

Other observations since the move.

Builds seem to be a little faster with TypeScript than Babel. I can't say I can prove this. I didn't do any actual tests on this, but just a feeling I got after migration.

Sourcemaps seem to actually work. Whenever I used BabelJS, debugging and stepping through async/await it just never seemed to line up right for me. This was likely user-error or in-proper configuration of babel on my part, so who knows... but having working source-maps is AMAZING, especially with the async/await feature.

One area of concern that I haven't yet worked through. Is the JSPM typescript loading up in the browser - or running jspm bundle app at the command line doesn't report any typescript errors - or fail any builds. However, I'm glad it doesn't because something isn't quite rite with my configuration as every import of a .tsx file reports an error. So, for now I'm just relying on the red squigglies in my VS Code editor to help me catch typing errors.

If you go for this port in your own project, I hope this was helpful, and that your port goes well.

So, Microsoft created what really turned out to be an amazing set of HTML/JS/CSS controls when they released the WinJS library. Not to go too much into the history, but honestly I hated it when I first had to use it. But, let me clarify. It wasn't until this last year when I learned that I didn't hate the WinJS controls by themselves, but I despised the way you declared their usage using the specialized win-* html attributes. It felt like a total hack to get an app up and running by littering semantic html with these attributes.

Then along comes a little toy project they created called react-winjs and all of a sudden the WinJS "Components" made total sense. When looking at them through the lense of WinJS through ReactJS components was the first time that I not only clicked with WinJS, but I actually fell in lov... (well I won't go that far), but was excited enough about them to pick them as the primary U.I. control suite while building out a little side-project.

Fast forward a year of development, and Microsoft essentially bailed on WinJS but at least they left it out in the open so I could hack on it and continue to depend on my own fork for the time being.

Then, they announce a NEW & SHINY library that can be used to help develop UWP and TV/Xbox One apps which is great. Except, WinJS doesn't work with this new library out-of-the-box, and since Microsoft isn't adding new features to WinJS, they likely never will build-in compatibility with the new & shiny library.

Guess that means we (I) have to figure it out on my own. And although I write this knowing that I'm probably the ONLY developer on the planet using this combination of libraries, I wanted to put out some of the hacks/code I've thrown together to get some WinJS controls to play nice with TVJS with regards to focus management.

What is focus management you say?

In the context of an Xbox app, the idea is to take your'e web-page-app and get rid of the ugly mouse-like-cursor you'd see if you didn't do this and replace it with a controller navigable approach - so up/down/left/right on the controller moves the visible "focus" around the application and the A button "presses enter" (or invokes) the control/button/etc.

What IS provided by TVJS

The TVJS library has a helper within it called DirectionalNavigation and is great in that it provides a focused and specific API to enable focus management while developing a Xbox App UWP Javascript (& C#) apps.

Just dropping the library in is enough to get much of the basics to work with most web apps.

However, the conflict between this and WinJS comes into play because WinJS also tried to implement some of their own focus management and the mix of these two just doesn't quite cut it.

Get rid of mouse cursor

Well, this isn't really a hack:

If you're looking at building a UWP JavaScript app for the Xbox, and tried to run your app on the Xbox (in dev mode), you may have noticed that your app behaves almost like it was just another web-page and doesn't default the cursor focus the way other xbox apps work. You're app just has a mouse-like cursor.

The way to deal with this is just by accessing the browser's gamepad api. Now, the Microsoft TVJS TVHelpers DirectionalNavigation library automatically does this for you, but for a better experience if you don't want to wait for the browser to download this library, you can manually access the api to hide the mouse cursor by throwing this at the top of your start page EX: index.html

By not allowing WinJS to add it's XYFocus handlers, we can avoid many of the issues that I worked through below...

Dealing with a WinJS Pivot control

For my app, the first control I ran into trouble with was the WinJS Pivot control. This control already does some focus management all by itself, and it's own management style contradicts the way the DirectionalNavigation helper works. So we basically have to detect focus on it, turn of TVJS focus management and handle it internally (until we leave focus of the Pivot).

Now when I navigate around using an Xbox controller I can properly navigate around the WinJS Pivot.

Next up are ItemContainers.

UPDATE:

With the added (remove XYFocus above - I removed the below hack)

This one is a total hack, and I look forward to a better solution, but for now it's been working.

The issue I was seeing was with WinJS ItemContainers and the TVJS library applying a separate forced "click" on the element when the control itself has already "clicked/invoked" the element.

The real fix would likely to figure out how to get the ItemContainer to event.preventDefault() and/or event.stopPropagation() and avoid the bubbling up to the documentkeyup event handler that DirectionalNavigation has under it's control, but WinJS ItemControl management is just so complicated that this hack was easier to figure out at the time I threw it together.

So what does this do?

It's basically hijacking the DirectionalNavigation._handleKeyUpEvent function, and re-writing it with one that ignores the keyup event if the currently focused element is an ItemContainer.

ItemContainers within a ContentDialog

UPDATE

That's just a big mess from what I could figure out. I was able to get it working by using the ContentDialog but manually creat my own buttons as the ItemContainer in combination with the dialog kept swallowing events that didn't allow focus navigation to be sucessful. The internals of what was holding me back didn't appear to be monkey-patch-able from what I could tell... ugh...

One big improvement could be to consider setting up a unit-test that could take the original "string" value of the entire function code, and comparing it to the current version of WinJS library you're using and fail if they're even one character different. This would allow you to detect if say a fix were applied, or you need to update our local hacked version with some remote changes... It's not pretty, but one way to avoid over-writing possible working WinJS code with our potentially not-so-future-proof hacked version.

Next one is the WinJS [ToggleSwitch].

This control just seemed to have all behavior wrong for me. So I hacked the keyDownHandler and simplified it's implementation which seems to have really made it more usable (for me).

The original had up/down/left/right configured to toggle the switch on/off which meant focus in/out was nearly impossible, it also only listened to space as a toggle option. So by removing the up/down/left/right we can navigate in/around the control and we wanted to listen to space, GamepadA, and enter to toggle the control on/off.

What else?

The WinJS control set is quite large, and I certainly haven't worked with each control in this manor, however, it's a step forward eh and if you managed to come across this random post on the interweb I hope it was useful?

There's this little "CD" utility that I iterate on every once in while but has become one of my favorite PowerShell tools on Windows.

Not because it's really that great, but more because there are some navigation habits I acquire over on a Mac in a ZSH terminal that become challenging to not have on a Windows PowerShell terminal and each time I iterate on it, it synchronizes my workflows on both Mac and Windows environments.

In my previous update I added support for typing cd ...N where cd .. will go up 1 directory, so cd .... will go up 3 directories.

Well today I found out that I can declare a function in powershell with a name .. - WHO KNEW?

For example if you pasted the following into your PowerShell terminal: function ..() { echo "HELLO"; }; ..

This would define the function .. as well as run it and print out HELLO.

This was a fantastic stumbling on my part because on my Mac I often go up 1-n directories by typing .. at the terminal or ..... <-- however many I want to go up.

We use JIRA's kanban board for daily workflow of tasks. I started having an issue with the default JIRA board layout where the cards do not show enough of a task's title, especially when you pseudo-group tickets by prefixing their title with some context.

Given that, I decided to hack the CSS of JIRA's board to improve this. Take a look at an example before/after of the tweaks below, then I'll walk through how you can get it if you so desire.

Before

After CSS Hack

How did you do that?

Install a CSS style plugin into your browser. This post all use Stylebot for the Chrome web browser.

Just install the plugin from the Chrome store by clicking this link and selecting [+ ADD TO CHROME] button on the upper right of the page.

Once the plugin is installed. Close all tabs and re-open a tab to the JIRA kanban board.

Click the new Stylebot plugin CSS button and the Open Stylebot... option in your chrome browser toolbar which will open up a U.I. that allow you to mess around with the page's style.

At the bottom of the Stylebot click Edit CSS which will give you a blank text box you can write custom CSS into.